Life’s Work: An Interview with Alice Waters

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When Waters opened Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California, in 1971, she didn’t expect to spark a national movement toward local, organic, sustainably sourced food or to inspire a generation of chefs to follow in her footsteps. But she did. Now a committed activist, she is the founder of the Edible Schoolyard Project, which has spawned food education programs in more than 5,000 schools. She still oversees her single restaurant.

HBR: How did you shift from restaurateur to activist?

WATERS: Well, I’d been active before in the antiwar and civil rights movements in the 1960s. But after President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were shot, I just kind of dropped out. I wanted to do something I was passionate about and open a little restaurant and feed my friends the French food I’d fallen in love with when I went to Paris in the early ’60s. In trying to find that food I ended up on the doorstep of the local organic producers. I depended on them, became friends with them, celebrated them. I realized that the people who take care of the land are precious and need to be paid for the hard work they do. I didn’t think that was radical. I mean, I knew it was part of the counterculture to avoid industrial food and buy from farmers’ markets. But to me it seemed natural: We take care of the land; we celebrate the harvest; we use seasonal, local ingredients to cook together; and we sit down at the table to eat.

Aside from sourcing, how did Chez Panisse stand out?

I was always looking to this French model of a little restaurant, not fancy, maybe one Michelin star, with every detail just so. People thought I was obsessed about lighting, portion size, and everything else. And I was pretty uncompromising, but I was also always willing to listen to somebody with a better idea. I wanted people to love what we were cooking. That was most important. So I used as much olive oil as I wanted, and I was willing to give people more than they expected, and I never cared about making money. We had only one menu each night, and that forced us to discover new ingredients because we wanted to surprise people. We even hired a forager.

With no formal culinary training, why did you think you could become a chef?

I think I was empowered by the counterculture movement, which said, “You can do whatever you want.” It was in that spirit that my friends and I opened Chez Panisse. We didn’t have to be chefs. We read about French cooking and thought, Well, if we make a mistake, we’ll give people something else to eat. If you burned the corn soup, you called it grilled corn soup. It was collaborating with a group of friends, and we tried to make something that was greater than the sum of the parts.

How do you foster teamwork?

Everybody on the cooking team can say something about what’s being cooked. It’s not a pyramid where the vegetable choppers do all the prep work in the morning and the chefs cook in the afternoon. The chefs wash and dry the salad, too, and we all taste the dish. You learn something when you work with food from beginning to end, and if you are listening to people and considering their opinions, they feel like they’re part of something bigger. The mission also empowers everybody—from the dishwashers to the night cleanup crew. They know we have a part to play in trying to change the food system in the United States.

You were trained in Montessori education. How did that inform the way you ran the restaurant?

Montessori emphasizes learning by doing, using all the senses. You touch, taste, smell, look, and listen. I wanted the experience of the restaurant to be like that. So I would fan the smells of rosemary outside so that when people approached, they were subconsciously stirred. I put beautiful flowers on the table and food on the counters. And then, of course, they could touch and taste what they were served but also come into the kitchen and see it being cooked.

What qualities do you look for in your team members?

I hire people who bring different talents and cultivate a collaborative spirit. When someone is too involved in their own work, it’s very hard to have them in the kitchen. I ask people what they like to cook for themselves, where they shop, what books they read. I want to know if they’ve ever worked on a farm and whether they ate dinner with their family at night when they were little. I’ve always wanted a balance of men and women, and I treasure the people who come from other countries, who have traveled and speak other languages. We have a big internship program, which brings university students in, and I think that constant change keeps us alive.

Now that Whole Foods is everywhere, and so many restaurants follow your local-food model, do you feel you’ve succeeded?

Sadly, I think a lot of big supermarkets have hijacked terms from this movement and confused people. The produce isn’t all seasonal or local. The meat isn’t all organic and grass-fed. So we still have to ask lots of questions: Where did the beef come from? Whose farm? Was it grass-fed all its life? I always go to the farmers’ market, so I’m connected with the people who grow the food. And if I see sunflowers in December, I don’t go back to that place, because I know they’re using a very industrial system.

When you’re trying to promote a new idea, like Edible Schoolyards, how do you persuade people to get on board?

I think people sense my passion. But I also try to feed them the idea—literally. I make a meal, put a placemat down, and serve the appropriate food in portion and purity. I make it irresistibly tasty. And then we can talk. When I was trying to lobby President Clinton, I always thought that if I could give him a perfect peach, he would understand everything. Right now I’m at the American Academy in Rome, the purpose of which is to generate interdisciplinary conversations between scholars. For 100 years they had a U.S.-style cafeteria, but eight years ago we changed the food. After the first day, half the people came back. After the second day, everybody did. And now they’re having those conversations at the table.

How do you respond to criticism that the way you shop and cook isn’t really feasible for people at lower income levels?

That’s a message coming from a fast-food industry that would prefer you buy packaged meals. It suggests that you don’t want the drudgery of cooking or going to a farmers’ market or having a garden. But when you buy direct and cook yourself, it cuts out the middleman: The money goes to somebody who is taking care of the land, and you’re giving your family more-nutritious food. I understand that when people don’t know how to cook, it might be hard to imagine making three meals out of one expensive chicken. But it’s not difficult to learn, and it’s a pleasure. If we all learn basic cooking skills, we can make extremely affordable food.

Over the course of your career, how have you balanced running the single but very important restaurant and your activism with the Edible Schoolyard project?

I’m in conversation pretty much all the time with the main chefs at the restaurant. Even when I’m away, they’re sending me their menus for comment. But I’m really very trusting, and I want them to run it as if it were theirs. I’m not trying to hold on to it. I trust the whole process. Whether I’m there or not is not important—although I do think my opinion is valuable.

Do you ever consider slowing down or retiring?

I always promised I would have a commune with my friends, and that’s in the back of my mind. But again, it’s always been about meaningful work for me. So maybe an intergenerational project: a tortillaria and a printing press. We could print news about edible education in an artful way and wrap the tortillas in it. We’d have a place with a courtyard in the middle and housing around the perimeter, like a California mission, with the business in the front part. We, the older population, could take care of the children and the gardens and hand pat the tortillas and make ourselves useful.

Chez Panisse was something of a financial disaster the first couple of years. How did you turn it around?

It was my father who did that. He was a manager at Prudential for nearly 30 years, then worked at the Institute of Social Research in Ann Arbor before starting his own consulting firm, Organization Dynamics, in Berkeley. He loved me and that I wanted to start a restaurant, and my parents mortgaged their house so I could. When we were in that crisis, he asked, “Do you want me to help?” and I said yes. He told me, “You need to get a computer,” and we got one. Then he said, “You need a business manager,” and he found somebody. Then, when he saw how we were buying food, he said, “You need a farm.” He and my mother looked at all the farms within an hour of Chez Panisse, and he came back and presented three. But he really loved only one—run by Bob Cannard—so we connected, and now we’ve been working together for almost 30 years.

Your restaurant was revolutionary not just for its menus but for offering flexible work schedules for the staff. How did you weigh the costs and benefits?

In the restaurant, café, and pastry, we have a two-chef system. It’s hard for me to describe how valuable that is. It means you have a whole group of chefs who could take over in an emergency or if one person wants more time off. They also have time to be with their families and to research the food they’re cooking. They can work days instead of nights. They can be home for dinner. And since we did that, the food has dramatically improved, because there’s this healthy competition and collaboration that goes on. It really sparks the imagination. When I want to know something about food, I can ask six head chefs and six sous chefs. We’re all able to hear criticism. This has helped Chez Panisse survive. It’s never on automatic.

Did you ever feel extra pressure as a woman working in a traditionally male-dominated industry?

I never thought about it. But I did use my femininity, if you will, to get what I wanted. I’d go to the meat guy and sweetly ask, “Couldn’t you help me?” He’d say, “Of course,” and I’d get those sweetbreads.

You seem like such an effective delegator. Why is there still only one Chez Panisse?

Because what I like best is knowing the people I work with and the people who come into the restaurant, so it feels like a home. It’s just such a personal thing for me. I cannot imagine having to fly to multiple restaurants; I’d rather eat in other people’s.

Do you consider the places run by your alumni to be little offshoots?

Yes. I mean, I always wanted a great little Sunday brunch at Chez Panisse, but we never could accomplish it. So now I go eat at Russell Moore’s Camino practically every Sunday, because it’s better than I imagined a brunch could be. I feel the same way about Ignacio Mattos’s Estela in New York. Sometimes chefs are a little afraid to leave the nest; I have to push them out, and then they’re liberated. Sometimes the transition is more difficult; it can be hard when people leave. But then I’m so impressed with what they do, and we find a way back to be a family again, and it’s very touching to see this philosophy about food spread.

A version of this article appeared in the May–June 2017 issue (p.176) of Harvard Business Review.